>Regarding your job, and more specifically your income, the
>problem is that an income tax presupposes that the government
>has a right to the fruits of your labor. It is not that taxes
>are new, or even that income taxes are new, but rather that
>they represent a form of slavery.

I'd love to go through each one of these things, but it wouldn't be very useful to either of us as far as readability goes...

>The functions of government cost money. The reason you have
>roads, fire departments, power lines, clean(ish) air and
>water, police protection, public schools, national defense,
>sewers, a safety net for illness or disability, public
>defenders in court, and the like as an American is because the
>population pays taxes.

None of these things existed before government control/influence/involvement? That isn't true.

Most of those are controlled by state and local governments, which is much more desirable.

And finally, the amounts of my taxes that goes to those things I actually use is dwarfed by that which I will either never see benefit from (social security/medicare/medicaid/etc.) or which I don't support (foreign aid/wars on foreign soil/etc.

>You can choose different distributions of taxation. You could
>have every citizen pay roughly 1/300,000,000th of the federal
>budget. (Historically speaking, you'd end up with a large
>group of starving, broke, angry people on your hands, but
>let's play the Ayn Rand Utopia Game and assume everyone
>succeeds.) You'd still be paying for the services.

How about I pay for the services I use. That seems fair. That seems to be how businesses get by.

>You can choose what the tax is based on. We use a combination
>of income, ownership (property taxes, etc.) and consumption
> sales taxes, etc.). You can shift that around all you like,
>but at some level the government is sending you a bill and you
>are paying it.
>
>You can eliminate services and reduce the federal budget, but
>it becomes a matter of degree. Maybe you decide that Service
>X is unnecessary, and the budget is therefore lowered, but you
>still need to pay for Services Y and Z.

That sounds like a good idea... when was the last time we did that?

>At the end of the day, everyone requires some level of
>government-level services. (If you dispute this, please look
>at the history of how things go with no effective government
>present. See: Congo, Democratic Republic of) If you
>excessively privatize this, you end up with a plutocracy.

I don't consider this to be true...

http://www.mises.org/story/1121

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth

>If
>having police protection scaled with what you paid (free
>market solution), only the wealthy would enjoy any significant
>protection. (The United States already has plutocratic
>elements to some extent, but additional privitization furthers
>it.)

Police protection is a farce. I can protect myself much better than the police can or would. It seems to me that the very wealthy already hire private protection (Hi Vlad!) and that the poor wouldn't exactly consider the police their best friends.

>Thus, every successful economy in history has chosen to
>collectivize functions susceptible to the "tragedy of the
>commons"-- national and civil defense being the oldest
>example, but transportation grids, ecosystem integrity, and
>educational systems are examples of things adopted in every
>country with a sufficient level of development.

National defense, sure. I would argue that police forces have been oppressive and ineffective since the beginning of time and have almost always been created for that purpose.

>These
>institutions are the reason you can have rights. In
>the absence of government, your rights are strictly limited to
>what you can assert by force, and that is when you'd
>find out what the word "slavery" means.

Nope, sorry, but I was "endowed by (my) Creator with certain unalienable Rights, (and) that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.". Presumably so were you.

>"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
>- James Madison
>
>valguarnera@carrionfields.com

I am no anarcho-capitalist, and I certainly do consider some functions to be the proper domain of government. Some thing should be taken care of nationally (defense), others by the state (transportation), and other at more local levels (education), but our government, especially at the federal level has go so far beyond what the law allows (law being the constitution) it frightens me.